he discerned presently to be the goblin his nurse had used to frighten him in his infancy; then the face of his uncle, the elder Jonathan Gay, with his restless and suffering look; and after this the face of Kesiah, wearing her deprecation expression, which said, “It isn’t really my fault that I couldn’t change things”; and then the faces of women he had seen but once, or passed in the street and remembered; and in the midst of these crowding faces, the scarred and ravaged face of an old crossing-sweeper on a windy corner in Paris. . . .  “I wish they’d leave me alone,” he thought, with the helplessness of delirium, “I wish they’d keep away and leave me alone.”  He wanted to drive these hallucinations from his brain, and to recapture the exhilarating sense of discovery he had lost the minute before, but because he sought it, in some unimaginable way, it continued to elude him.  The loud hum of bees in the Indian summer confused him, and he thought impatiently that if it would only cease for an instant, his mind might clear again, and he might think things out—­that he might even remember the important things he had forgotten.  “Abner Revercomb shot me,” he said aloud.  “I don’t know much.  I don’t know whether I am alive or dead.  All I am certain of is that it doesn’t matter in the least—­that it’s too small a fact to make any fuss about.  It’s all so small—­the blamed thing isn’t any more important than those bees humming out there in the meadow.  And I might as well have developed into any one of my other selves.  What were all those seeds of possibilities for if they never came to anything?  Why, I might have been a hero—­it was in me all the time—­I might even have been a god.”

Then for the first time he became aware of his body as of something outside of himself—­something that had been tacked on to him.  He felt all at once that his feet were as heavy as logs—­that they were benumbed, that they had fallen asleep, and were filled with the sharp pricking of thorns.  Yet he had no control over them; he could not move them, could hardly even think of them as belonging to himself.  This sensation of numbness began slowly to crawl upward like some gigantic insect.  He knew it would reach his knees and then pass on to his waist, but the knowledge gave him no power to prevent its coming, and when he tried to will his hand to move, it refused to obey the action of his brain.

“I’m really out of my head,” he thought, and the next instant, “or, it’s all a dream, and I’ve been only a dream from the beginning.”

A century afterwards, he opened his eyes and saw a face bending over him, which seemed as if it were of gossamer, so vague and shadowy it looked beside the images of his delirium.  An excited and eager humming was in his ears, but he could not tell whether it was the voices of human beings or the loud music of the bees in the meadow.  From his waist down he could feel nothing, not even the crawling of the gigantic insect, but the rest of his body was a single throbbing pain, a pain so intense that it seemed to drag him back from the gulf of darkness into which he was drifting.